The invention relates to telecommunications equipment and, more particularly, to the allocation, or provisioning, of telecommunications equipment.
Telecommunications networks may include a myriad of network elements interconnected in extremely complex arrangements to provide communications among thousands, even millions, of subscribers. The network elements are typically housed in equipment buildings and are organized in bays within the building. Each bay may include several shelves of equipment, with each shelf including one or more circuit packs. Each circuit pack, in turn, may provide for communications through several included ports. Communications through each port may be divided into several tributaries and the type of communications may be further divided, for example, into xe2x80x9cworkingxe2x80x9d or xe2x80x9cprotectionxe2x80x9d categories. Provisioning such an arrangement can be an extraordinarily complicated process, with craft workers, charged with the responsibility of creating and modifying the communications paths that serve millions of people. In order, for example, to set up a test port for monitoring communications through a particular tributary, a craft worker might be forced to enter lengthy strings of alphanumeric data that indicate the bay, shelf, pack, port, working, or protection status for each of the tributaries involved. With strings of alphanumeric characters the only feedback afforded a craft worker, the craft worker may have difficulty determining whether they have entered the correct strings, thereby making the desired connections. Such data entry is fraught with the potential for error, and errors may, in addition to wasting a craft worker""s time, cause catastrophic losses of communications links.
Given the complexity of interconnections within telecommunications systems, a system that provides for readily comprehensible indicia of telecommunications provisioning would therefore be highly desirable.
A provisioning system in accordance with the principles of the present invention provides graphical feedback to a craft worker, or user, which indicates to the user possible provisioning schemes and may also indicate actually provisioned paths. A variety of interactive display techniques, such as pull down menus, dialog boxes, color coding, icons, and affordances, for example, may be employed in conjunction with the graphical templates to provide visual cues regarding network provisioning to a user. A wizard may be employed to step a user through the provisioning process, from one template to another.
In accordance with the principles of the present invention, a provisioning system may be employed in such provisioning applications as, for example, providing access to a test fixture or establishing a cross-connection. A variety of functions, that allow a user to create, modify, view, or delete provisioned paths for example, may be available to a user exercising any of the provisioning applications.